My New Year resolution: stop being a lousy friend

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/01/new-year-resolution-stop-being-lousy-friend

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Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Although “forgot” is too strong, strictly speaking – “neglected” is maybe more like it. After all, you’re still friends on Facebook, so have pretty much kept track of whether they’re still with thingummy or how old their kids are. You maybe even exchanged Christmas cards, in which once again you both wrote that you’d love to meet up this year and once again definitely meant it, even though you both know that once again you probably won’t.

And if you bumped into them in the street tomorrow you’d be thrilled. You’re definitely still friends; just not friends that actually see each other. Well, everyone has busy lives. And thus an old friendship dwindles quite by accident into auld acquaintance, before eventually petering out altogether.

So no, it absolutely shouldn’t happen. But it does all too easily. And that’s why my own New Year resolution for 2016 is to stop being a lousy friend; stop relying on goodwill banked too many years ago; stop meaning to have people over to dinner just as soon as we’re through this stupidly busy period and then failing to do so; stop thinking I’ll phone tomorrow or maybe at the weekend – and start doing better before it’s too late, as one day it always is.

Related: With a little help from your friends you can live longer

Friendship circles shrink over the age of 30, for all the obvious reasons. Falling in love pushes around two friends out of the average person’s intimate social milieu, according to research from the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, as the newly coupled-up fall off the radar. But it’s the arrival of kids that really holes auld acquaintance below the waterline, even if the new parent didn’t overnight transform into someone who can’t ever do Sunday lunch again because Gina Ford says that’s naptime.

Sure, NCT (National Childbirth Trust) groups and school gates spawn new friendships – at least until your kids grow up, and decide that actually they hate their kids – but years of being unable to stay awake past 9pm do little for longstanding ones. Being a good friend takes time and effort, and occasionally generosity of spirit, all things that tend to be sorely lacking in people scraping by on three hours’ sleep a night. And by the time you finally come up for air, things don’t seem quite the same – social hierarchies have been subtly realigned, and social skills feel surprisingly rusty. How does this whole thing work, again?

Odd that there are a billion self-help books on how to be a better parent, better lover, better cook, better almost everything, and yet surprisingly little on how to be a better friend. It seems a strange omission when friendship is so key to human happiness, perhaps even to human survival.

Having good, close friendships and a busy social life is associated with a lower risk of everything from heart attacks and high blood pressure to Alzheimer’s (the theory is that the happier and more relaxed you are, the less likely you are to fall back on bad habits such as drinking heavily or overeating under stress). Which means that resolving to gain a friend in 2016 might be almost as good for the health as resolving to lose the half a stone (3kg) that nobody loses every January, and certainly a lot more fun.

And to be blunt, being able to rub along agreeably with other people has economic value too. It’s wrong but understandable that in most workplaces the broadly likable tend to get promoted faster than the competent but difficult; that personal chemistry matters, even at the highest level.

Ask David Miliband, who would have been Labour leader if only he’d put slightly fewer of his parliamentary colleagues’ backs up over the years. (And no, electing the other Miliband wouldn’t necessarily have been Labour’s salvation, but it would doubtless have made him rather happier.) Never mind beauty or riches, the gift any half-decent fairy godmother would surely bestow at a christening is the lifelong ability to make – and keep – friends easily.

And the first wave of her wand should probably be to convey that it’s not a numbers game. Loneliness is a miserable pandemic, especially among older people – and among men of a generation whose wives always arranged their social lives, only for them to realise to their dismay that they barely know where to start once she’s gone. But the frenzied accumulation of insignificant others isn’t painless either.

Dunbar’s previous work suggests most people have between four and six really close friends, whom they might see weekly. Beyond that is a more distant group we see less often but would still actively miss if they dropped dead tomorrow. And beyond that – well, most humans can’t really maintain meaningful relationships with more than about 150 people. Which does make me wonder whether the snarling aggression on social media of late is a side-effect of people struggling to deal not with too few social connections but too many.

For humans to have social networks this big and complex is a historically unprecedented thing, almost an invasion of mental space; the emotional equivalent of being packed too tightly into an overcrowded rush-hour train, and feeling an inchoate rage bubbling up inside at every accidental elbow in the ribs. No wonder some people make such a belligerent hash of it, lashing out blindly at strangers, behaving in ways they never would face to face. The future of social media may well be slightly less social and rather more private, as we learn that being good at getting on with other people is partly a matter of knowing when to stop; of understanding that the circuit can’t expand indefinitely.

But the other thing to know is that being a good friend surely changes with age. If the definition of a good friend at 25 was someone willing to stick around for the bad times as well as the good, by 45 that’s almost reversed. It’s company in the good times that is like gold dust now.

It’s nice, of course, when people drop everything for a friend in an emergency. But emergencies are rare, and the rest of life is long. So the people who ring for a chat for no particular reason, who’d never dream of wimping out on the night of a party even if they are quite comfortable on the sofa, who never lose interest in the world around them – they’re the ones never to be forgot. Happy New Year.